Hot Shot: Gallery Shooter
Collaboration with Jelena Pištinjat
I was responsible for coding the game in Processing 3, creation of game assets, assembly and coding of the electronic components, and half of the physical cabinet construction.

Hot Shot: Gallery Shooter, 2019

This piece explores the presence of guns in America, not just as a weapon, but as a form of entertainment. It also questions how reasonable the notion of a gun as a form of entertainment is. While making the piece, the artists also contemplated the prevalence of toy guns, their regulations, and how to effectively engage individuals who may feel strongly about guns as a necessary aspect of American culture. In the end, this piece was designed to create a feeling of unease in the user/viewer, as well as in those in the surrounding room. The piece consists of an arcade cabinet styled after gallery shooter arcade games from the late 1990s and early 2000s and draws stylistic inspiration from gun range billboards and advertisements in the United States. In the game, the user is presented with a blue arcade gun (representational of an AR-15), uses it to “shoot” the start button, and then is presented with live footage of the gallery space. When the user shoots the video representations of others in the space, they are rewarded with 100 points added to their score. The game is a high score game, where the goal is to beat the current highest score.

In Processing, an XBox360 Kinect depth camera was used to create a black and white mask out of pixel blobs (people in the room). Pixel color data was taken from this footage to determine “hits” and ”misses” and then life footage from the same perspective was overlaid on top for the player’s interface. The arcade gun is a toy AR-15 that was rated safe for children 3 and up. Some of the electronics inside were removed and the remaining space was filled with an IR positioning camera communicating with an Arduino Micro via I2C bus, a tilt switch and a momentary switch. The tilt switch was used for reloading the gun in-game and the momentary switch was placed behind the trigger to act as the shooting mechanism. The Arduino Micro sent the button and coordinate data through the serial port to Processing, where the game was coded. The game is played on a 720p monitor (with 2 IR LEDs attached) inside of a half-inch plywood arcade cabinet that was cut in a CNC machine, assembled, and painted.

Painted wooden cabinet with plexiglass and prints on paper, interactive video game, Arduino, IR positioning camera, IR LEDs, toy AR-15, XBox Kinect

Collaboration with Jelena Pištinjat

27.5" x 6'9" x 43"